Lone Ranger’ is overlong, overdone

3 — Today’s teens may know little of the Lone Ranger and Tonto, though the fictional Wild West duo have been around since the 1930s on radio, TV, film and in comic books — just not lately. And this elaborate, revisionist, Tonto-focused how-they-met saga, despite its much-publicized production troubles, may win teens over. It’s a good half-hour too long, wildly overproduced, and the violence may be too intense for some middle-schoolers, but it’s surprisingly enjoyable. Director Gore Verbinski, who gave us the first three “Pirates of the Caribbean” films (PG-13s) and “Rango” (PG, 2011), has a knack for blending action, humor and dabs of history. A little boy (Mason Elston Cook) wanders into a Wild West Exhibition in 1933 San Francisco. An ancient-looking Native American (Johnny Depp as Tonto) suddenly comes to life and tells the startled child, as we head into the past, how he met a naive young lawyer named John Reid (Armie Hammer) who helped him escape prison chains on a train heading west. They tussle with another prisoner, the evil Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner), famous for cutting out and eating the hearts of victims. John Reid’s brother Dan (James Badge Dale), a Texas Ranger, deputizes John and they go off to make peace with Indian tribes along the still-expanding railroad. Dan dies in a mysterious ambush. Tonto reappears, along with a white “spirit horse.” They bring John Reid, also injured and presumed dead, back to life. The two men become the masked Lone Ranger and his eccentric Ojibwe partner Tonto, with a dead crow on his head and his face heavily painted. They take on Cavendish and the smarmy railroad man (Tom Wilkinson) who has a yen for Rebecca (Ruth Wilson), Reid’s widowed sister-in-law, whom he has always loved. Tonto’s back story carries more weight than John Reid/The Lone Ranger’s here. He has a tragic past. The tension between the two men over justice versus revenge adds depth.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Many Indians, infantrymen, bad guys and horses die amid hails of bullets (including early machine guns) or from arrows or knives. One man is pistol-whipped. The PG-13 rating holds because little blood is shown. However, the scene in which Cavendish cuts out and eats dying lawman Dan Reid’s heart, while not graphic on camera, is very strongly implied. Chase scenes atop trains and across deserts are thrilling but not scary. Nonexplicit scenes occur in a brothel, where the madame (Helena Bonham Carter) hides a pistol in her wooden leg. Rebecca is subtly threatened with rape. Her young son (Bryant Prince) is held at gunpoint. Scorpions crawl over The Lone Ranger’s and Tonto’s faces.

“Despicable Me 2” PG — Kids 6 and older will get a charge and a good giggle out of this 3-D sequel. It’s missing the dark humor that hung too heavily over the first act of the original animated film (“Despicable Me,” PG, 2010), and it is the better for it. The pointy-nosed, spindly-legged former villain Gru (voice of Steve Carell) has happily adopted the orphan girls Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Elsie Kate Fisher), and given up evil. In fact, his mad scientist, Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand), bored with inventing fart guns to amuse the girls and Gru’s googly-eyed, banana-yellow minions, decides to leave. Enter an amusingly clumsy secret agent (and potential love interest for Gru) named Lucy (Kristen Wiig) from the Anti-Villain League. Instead of just asking Gru to work with them, she abducts him and takes him to their headquarters. She and her boss, Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan), want Gru to infiltrate a shopping mall as the owner of a cupcake store so he can trace the source of a serum that turns benign creatures into monsters. Then, undercover at the mall, Gru meets a restaurateur named Eduardo (Benjamin Bratt), who reminds him of a onetime villain, El Macho (also Bratt). Eduardo’s son Antonio (Moises Arias) becomes Margo’s boyfriend, which drives Gru crazy with worry. Plus, his hilarious minions, with their slaptsick antics and garbled language, start disappearing.

THE BOTTOM LINE: A bad guy and his new serum turn a bunny, and later some of Gru’s yellow minions, into big, jagged-toothed purple monsters. Some kids, especially under-6s, may find this unsettling, especially in 3-D. A huge shark bares its teeth to Lucy and Gru while they’re in a mini-submarine. Gru remembers how unpopular he was as a kid. We see one minion’s bare behind.

“The Way, Way Back” PG-13 — High-schoolers will especially identify with this acerbic yet heartwarming saga of teen unhappiness caused by adults behaving badly. The movie may be a little risque for some middle-schoolers. Duncan (Liam James), a depressed 14-year-old, comes along grudgingly with his divorced mom Pam (Toni Collette) to spend the summer at her boyfriend Trent’s (Steve Carell) lake house. Poor Duncan cannot abide Trent or his mean-girl daughter (Zoe Levin). Self-important and phony, Trent tries to exert control over Duncan, and Pam is afraid to intervene. At the lake house, Duncan meets the kindhearted but drunk divorcee next door (Allison Janney), her pretty daughter (AnnaSophia Robb of TV’s “The Carrie Diaries”) and her young son (River Alexander) with his “lazy eye,” about which his mom jokes. It isn’t until Duncan goes to the Water Wizz Water Park and meets the manager, Owen (the great Sam Rockwell), that life starts to look up. Owen’s hilarious, improvisatory sense of humor helps Duncan relax and have fun. And watching Owen’s happy romance with fellow employee Caitlyn (Maya Rudolph) shows Duncan there’s another way to live. Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, who co-wrote and co-directed this film, also co-wrote the screenplay of “The Descendants” (R, 2011 ). That mix of sarcasm and heart triumphs here, too.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Adults drink a lot in the film. A teen girl jokes that as an adult she’ll “do drugs with my kids.” Mild-to-midrange profanity and semi-crude sexual slang pepper the dialogue. Once, a strongly profane misogynist word is euphemistically, but never actually spoken. Themes about infidelity and betrayal weave throughout. A visual gag at the water park involves guys asking girls in bikinis to pause for “safety” before heading down the big slide, but it’s just so they can stare at the girls’ derrieres.

“Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain” R — A concert film of comedian and actor Kevin Hart’s Madison Square Garden appearances during his 2012 tour, this movie aims its hilarity at young adults. Not for under-17s, it more than earns an R rating for graphic language and profanity, as Hart goes into riotous detail about everything from his sex life to the germophobic fear of having a homeless person touch his lip. The movie opens with Hart (seen most recently in the R-rated “This Is the End” and in “Real Husbands of Hollywood” on TV) throwing a party for himself, at which people come up to him and instead of offering congratulations, toss heavy criticism his way — about not dating darker skinned women, about a drunk-driving arrest — to which he responds by saying he’ll just go to Madison Square Garden and explain it all. Then we’re into his concert. The audience is often shown wiping away tears of laughter and by the end, Hart thanks them with tears of gratitude.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Hart’s style of comedy includes steaming profanity and highly explicit sexual language as well as repeated use of the B-word when talking about relationships in ways that could be viewed as misogynistic.

“Monsters University” G — Kids 6 and older who loved the original animated “Monsters, Inc.” (G, 2001) will be happy to see this 3-D prequel to learn how Mike Wazowski (voice of Billy Crystal), the little, rubbery, green-eyeball monster, and James P. Sullivan (John Goodman), aka “Sulley,” the big, furry, green-and-purple monster, met in college. Squeezing these characters into a college comedy format, with frat-house bullies and mean professors, may feel pretty labored to adults, but to kids it will seem fresh. In a prologue, we learn how little Mike fell in love with scaring as a tyke on a field trip to Monsters, Inc. He seems too gentle for the job of bursting into human kids’ bedrooms to frighten them, but he’s determined to get into Monsters University and major in scaring. Once there, his small size and mild manner make him a laughingstock. He and the overconfident Sulley become rivals, both earning the scorn of grim Dean Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren). When it’s time for the campus Scare Games, Mike and Sulley find themselves on the same team with the geekiest fraternity, and they forge a friendship.

A sweet animated short, “The Blue Umbrella,” precedes “Monsters University.” On a rainy night in the city, inanimate objects have expressive faces, while humans exist in the shadows. A blue umbrella and an orange one fall in love, though wind and traffic buffet the blue fellow at first.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Even in 3-D, the monsters look like harmless, funny variations on animals, with multiple heads, eyeballs, tentacles, spiny protuberances, rubbery skin, or pastel fur. Even the bullies aren’t too threatening. Only Dean Hardscrabble, part giant cockroach, part millipede, will put much fear into under-6s, so for them a 2-D showing might be best. Prickly obstacles in the Scare Games make Mike, Sulley and others swell up. The guys get stuck on the other side of a bedroom door in a summer camp, with police hunting them. There’s a bed-wetter gag.

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